Chapter 61: Tailor-Made

In the Wang Estate pavilion, steward Zhang Qing lay back with his eyes closed, his head resting on a serving girl's lap.

In his left ear drifted the pipa tune "Oleander," every word round and full; in his right ear came the crack of whips and the wails of garrison soldiers begging mercy, each cry more harrowing than the last.

Besides Zhang Qing, the pavilion held the serving girl, the young woman playing the pipa and singing, and a Company Commander standing off to one side.

"Well played, and well sung — that deserves a reward! Sing something more amusing. Once the Prince's residence transfer order comes through, you and your husband will follow this old master to Xi'an, a dazzling world of pleasure. Isn't that better than some worthless banner officer post?"

The Company Commander from Yan'an Guard stood at the pavilion's edge, nodding and forcing a smile.

The courtyard was far livelier than the pavilion. Estate hands in servants' garb wielded whips, flaying a guard battalion soldier until his skin split open, while the soldiers standing around were so terrified they held their breath like winter cicadas.

Seeing Zhang Qing in good spirits, the Company Commander finally dared to steel himself and speak: "Master, he knows he was wrong. If the beating goes on any longer..."

"Hm?"

Zhang Qing sat bolt upright, startling the serving girl, who hurriedly reached to straighten his robes — only to be shoved aside. "Clumsy hands. Get away."

He then stepped forward, face to face, glaring at the Company Commander. He raised a hand and delivered a crisp slap, then flung his arm out, pointing at the pipa-playing woman, and roared: "The tune changed!"

"You people are far too insolent."

Zhang Qing ordered the servants to keep flogging the soldier and lectured the crowd: "What sort of man do you take this old master for — some moody brute who just enjoys torturing you?"

"This old master loves rewarding people with silver, loves seeing people happy! The battalion commander at Yan'an Guard can't even put food on the table, yet this old master gives you two or three taels at a time, feeds you well, and what do you do in return?"

Zhang Qing was a household-born servant of the Prince of Qin's estate. His father had been the playmate of Prince of Qin Zhu Yihuan, serving as the prince's horse to ride on since childhood, and was therefore deeply trusted.

And it was precisely because of that trust that he had lived to this day.

So he was furious — fury born of an utter inability to comprehend how these people thought.

He had brought these guard battalion soldiers out of Yan'an Guard, where they never had enough to eat, and covered all their food, clothing, and shelter. When they served him well and put him in a good mood, he generously handed out silver.

But these garrison soldiers showed no gratitude.

Today one's wife had given birth, tomorrow another's family needed to harvest millet in the fields, the day after that someone else's parents had passed away.

Even if a wife died in a difficult childbirth, couldn't you just buy another one who could still bear children?

All excuses.

These ungrateful bastards were simply afraid to die. They grinned when taking the silver, but the moment you expected them to risk their lives, each one ran faster than the last!

"You say your lives are worthless, but isn't this old master's life just as worthless? This estate, this silver, our very lives — all belong to His Highness the Prince of Qin!"

No sooner had Zhang Qing's words faded than the clanging of the front courtyard servants pounding on the gate rang out. A garrison soldier, catching the signal, opened the courtyard gate, and a brown-robed old servant came rushing in, panic-stricken, and threw himself to the ground: "Master, the bandits have come to attack the fort again!"

They hurried to the fort's gate tower. Dusk was falling. Outside the fort, a vast, surging crowd of several hundred had split into two groups, encircling the fort on its east and west sides.

Hundreds more starving refugees were scattered through the Wang Estate fields, frantically harvesting the nearly ripe wheat.

A single glance was enough to tell that this siege was deliberate.

Faced with this scene, steward Zhang Qing was not worried. He turned to the Company Commander and asked, "Can we go out and drive them back?"

The Company Commander hung his head and shook it.

"If we can't drive them back, so be it. Let them have the grain outside. Have your men hold the fort. Same routine as last time."

Zhang Qing raised a hand: "Hold the fort. Once the government troops arrive, every man gets two taels of silver. Slaughter two sheep for the soldiers' evening meal. Send a man through the tunnel to get word to Yan'an Guard. Hold out five days, and the government troops will be here."

This exact procedure had been used just half a month ago. The garrison soldiers defending the fort knew it all too well.

When the Company Commander announced Zhang Qing's orders, the garrison soldiers were all delighted at the prospect of reward silver, and each took up position at the arrow slits, ready for battle.

Everything was a replay of the scene from half a month ago.

Only, no one noticed the heavy mass of figures on the cliff face in the darkness of night.

The roving bandits outside the fort were split into two groups, each two to three hundred strong, merely circling outside the fort with no intention of launching a forceful assault.

The figures on the cliff were in an awkward position.

Liu Chengzu, Liu Chengzong, Cao Yao, and Cai Zhongpan were all up on the mountain.

Their original plan had been to strike once it got dark. They had not expected two separate groups to arrive one after the other that very afternoon.

Those groups looked well-prepared too, each pushing small carts and carrying farm tools, swarming in without a word and surrounding the Wang Estate.

And after only a brief standoff, the two bandit groups quickly reached an unspoken understanding, dividing the estate fields outside the fort between them to harvest, and forming two battle lines to bottle up the garrison soldiers inside.

It was awkward. They had prepared contingency plans for all sorts of situations, even considered the possibility of someone beating them to the punch.

The one thing they had not anticipated was colliding like this — and with three separate groups colliding at once, no less.

The few of them were right there debating whether they should still go down when Liu Chengzong said, "What we're after isn't the same as what they want. Let them have what's outside the fort. We want what's inside."

Most crucially, these two bandit bands were not one group, yet they could coexist peacefully.

Just as they were talking, they heard a rustling sound coming from underfoot, moving northward. It gave them all a start, and they hurriedly signaled the surrounding border troops to stay silent.

Right after that, torchlight shone up from behind a small dirt slope below. A wooden plank door opened amid the weeds. First, a guard battalion soldier clambered up with difficulty, then turned and hauled another one up.

The first one out stamped his feet to shake off the dirt and shut the door, tidying up, completely unaware that his comrade, the moment he emerged, had frozen in place, not daring to move.

When he finished his task and looked up, he was dumbstruck.

In the flickering torchlight, on the slope above and below, over a dozen border troops in armor and bearing weapons had them surrounded tight as a drum.

Liu Chengzong tossed a rope forward. "What are you standing there gawking for? Tie yourselves up."

There was actually a tunnel here!

If these two hadn't crawled out, they would never have discovered it.

The two garrison soldiers who had emerged from the mountain were extremely cooperative and tied each other up.

They also held nothing back, quickly spilling every detail of the situation inside the Wang Estate fort.

There were still forty-eight garrison soldiers and over twenty servants inside the fort. This tunnel was narrow, only wide enough for one person at a time, and led to a cellar at the other end. The cellar's iron door was locked from the outside, so no one guarded it.

Cai Zhongpan frowned. "If that's the case, we still can't get down there."

"Not necessarily."

Liu Chengzong asked, "How thick is that iron door?"

The tightly bound garrison soldier said, "Half an inch. Unless you tear the whole door out, you can't break through."

"Why hit it? Just take the lock off the outside and that's it."

Liu Chengzong shook his head with a laugh and said to the group, "Isn't this an entrance tailor-made for us?"

His joy-stick's striking range was very small, only the size of a bowl's mouth or even smaller, but the purpose of the conical charge was to concentrate energy, so it could punch through armor plate in daylight.

Though black powder was a bit lacking, their opponents weren't armored steel either.

"What if it doesn't blast through?"

Cao Yao, thinking it through more, said, "I'll go down and talk to them. If it can blast through, I won't say anything else to them. If it can't, you come out and light a torch on the mountain, and I'll have them attack from outside."

Liu Chengzu said, "You can talk them into attacking from outside?"

Cao Yao, utterly unconcerned, waved a hand and said, "Worth a try. If not, I'll light a torch for you down below too."

Once the few of them had settled it, Liu Chengzong led his men, thrusting their thunder-lances forward, and swaggered into the tunnel.

In barely a moment, out of the corner of his eye Liu Chengzu saw a room in the fort below burst with flame.

Boom!

After a brief silence, a leg kicked the iron door open.

Liu Chengzong, utterly disheveled, stumbled and crashed out through the doorway, dropped his wooden pole and slapped at his ears, and only then drew his waist saber to signal toward the mountain.

Behind him, Gao Xian and the others filed out in succession, drawing their blades and rushing toward every part of the fort.